When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of technical terms. He undertakes the much more human and the much more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague and delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to the vessels that carry them. His fine imaginative mind--loving with a large receptive wisdom all the quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people--naturally turns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships. That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical achievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a trans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad. Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimate object to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is necessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to have become intimately associated with the hopes and fears, the fancies and terrors, of many generations. It is simply and solely their newness to human experience which makes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, however striking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of intrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does. And it is not only--as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad--that these old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carrying one back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves. They diffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the lives of those who are connected with them. They bring the mystery and terror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into every port. No great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors--sailors who _sail_ their ships--enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the narrow streets. The shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar superficial minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size for dignity, and brutal energy for noble strength. Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce these startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotional insignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition. What one thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works is always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with an integral soul.